Why Exploratorium After Dark is Awesome

Every first Thursday of every month, San Francisco’s best, awesomest attraction gets even better.

This is the day when Exploratorium, a science museum filled with hundreds of hands-on exhibitions, is open to adults only with bars selling cocktails scattered throughout its 330,000 sq ft ground.

If you visit during regular days, there will be hundreds of kids running around, pursued by their harried-looking parents. Some are obviously too young to understand the nature of the exhibitions and they happily occupy their time pushing every button and knocking everything on the table.

This is why Exploratorium After Dark event is so awesome. It’s an opportunity for us, adults, full control of the museum once a month without having to compete with kids of all ages over an exhibition (and somehow they always win, you know it). It allows adults to be kids again (but with body hair).

Many of the exhibitions there have helped make sense of the various tidbits I learned in my college days. Scientific tidbits that made little sense at the time are made clearer through the use of these ingenious (and very child-proof) experiments complete with explanations that actually make sense (why can’t college textbooks be written this way?).

But the After Dark event isn’t simply opening up the museum to adults only, every month there’s a different theme. There are various talks and workshops given according to that month’s theme throughout the museum. All included the price. To see what theme they have scheduled click here.

It’s truly something to walk around seeing the kind of expressions you often see on kids faces, but unfortunately not so much on fellow adults: puzzlement, wonderment, and delight.

I believe that every now and then we adults need to let go, run around filled with wonder, and experience the world as if for the first time.

This is why Exploratorium After Dark is so awesome. It’s because it allows us to exactly that without judgement. So go ahead, jump super high and have your silhouettes drawn on the glow in the dark wall, make funny faces in front of the very big mirror, and dare each other to ‘go ahead, touch it!’